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Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African...
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Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Health/Psychology/Social Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 September 2023) | Viewed by 7073

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Carol E. Henderson

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Office of the Provost, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
Interests: African American literature and culture; African American visual studies; justice, equity, diversity and inclusion; womanist studies; inclusive leadership; black body; spirituality and religion
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Religions invites submissions for a special journal issue that will examine the contemporary function and presence of religion in the lives of African Americans. Taking its cue from the journal title itself—religions—this special issue welcomes contributions with multidisciplinary approaches that consider “religion” as both a literal set of practices and value systems that anchor various spiritual, philosophical and cultural beliefs, and as an organizational tool that mobilizes communities for political and social change. As the gospel according to Common states, “the movement is a rhythm to us/freedom is like religion to us.”  Given the wide-range of topics and time-periods that could be discussed under this heading, specific attention will be given to papers that examine:

  • The sermon as social catalyst
  • Religion as wellness
  • Faith and the African American community
  • Gender and sexuality and African American religion
  • Religion as theme in African American literature
  • Sacred and secular in African American music
  • Political movements and African American religion
  • Religion and African American Film

Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted to special editor, Dr. Carol E. Henderson at  by August 1st. Completed and accepted papers of 5,000 to 20,000 words (excluding notes) should be submitted using the journal’s submission system by September 1st.

All submissions must contain original unpublished work not being considered for publication elsewhere. All essays are peer-reviewed.

Prof. Dr. Carol E. Henderson
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • religion
  • spirituality
  • faith
  • black social movements
  • African American sermon
  • Africa American literature
  • James Baldwin
  • James Cone
  • black film
  • black body
  • womanism

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 254 KiB  
Article
Dissembling Bodily and Literary Wholeness: Centering the Spirit in Disability Studies through Black Women’s Writing
by Anna Hinton
Religions 2024, 15(2), 193; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15020193 - 04 Feb 2024
Viewed by 550
Abstract
In this article, I analyze Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Erna Brodber’s Myal in order to demonstrate that African-derived spiritual systems are central in Black women’s fictional depictions and theorizing of healing and disability. I argue that the violence of what Moya Bailey [...] Read more.
In this article, I analyze Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Erna Brodber’s Myal in order to demonstrate that African-derived spiritual systems are central in Black women’s fictional depictions and theorizing of healing and disability. I argue that the violence of what Moya Bailey terms misogynoir is writ on Black women’s body, mind, and spirit—the latter of which is absent in disability studies frameworks yet central to healing and liberation in this literature. These writings present a syncretized spirituality drawn from African Diasporic, African Indigenous, and Indigenous American religious beliefs that have a more capacious understanding of wholeness and wellness to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a diversity of bodymindspirits. Black spiritual practice enables self-love and acceptance of disabled Black womanhood, and the Word, Nommo, bestows spiritual healing power. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans)
11 pages, 206 KiB  
Article
My Soul Looks Beyond in Wonder: Curating Faith, Freedom, and Futurity at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
by Michael Brandon McCormack
Religions 2024, 15(1), 51; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15010051 - 29 Dec 2023
Viewed by 764
Abstract
This article offers a description and critical reflection upon two recent exhibits on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC): Spirit in the Dark: Religion in Black Music, Activism, and Popular Culture and Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures [...] Read more.
This article offers a description and critical reflection upon two recent exhibits on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC): Spirit in the Dark: Religion in Black Music, Activism, and Popular Culture and Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures. The article explores the interplay of mutually reinforcing themes of faith, freedom, and futurity that emerge when examining the exhibits together. This article also demonstrates the public significance of the curation of religion and culture in museums and other cultural spaces beyond the academy and religious institutions. It further shows how religion becomes a site of critical meditation upon and creative manifestation or materialization of Black futures. As such, this article contributes to more expansive discourses on the interplay between Black studies and the study of religion. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans)
8 pages, 213 KiB  
Article
Preaching Outside the Temple: On the Literary Witness of James Baldwin as the Word Made Public
by Eric Lewis Williams
Religions 2023, 14(12), 1547; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14121547 - 16 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1285
Abstract
It was the late Bishop Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, former minister of the First Church of God in Christ of Brooklyn, New York, who said of the late famed novelist/essayist James Baldwin that “he was America’s inside eye on the Black Holiness and Pentecostal [...] Read more.
It was the late Bishop Ithiel Conrad Clemmons, former minister of the First Church of God in Christ of Brooklyn, New York, who said of the late famed novelist/essayist James Baldwin that “he was America’s inside eye on the Black Holiness and Pentecostal Churches”. Though Baldwin admitted that the culture and ethos of the African-American Pentecostal church were “highly significant and indelibly imprinted upon him”, according to Baldwin, his faith community’s “naiveté about life appalled him and drove him away”. While Baldwin left behind the church of his youth, never to return, for the remainder of his writing career, the “backslidden” minister’s literary musings continued to be informed (in both style and content) by the formative religious tradition that he left behind. Though several studies have been undertaken that examine Baldwin’s significance to various aspects of the study of African-American religion and culture, precious little has been written regarding Baldwin’s continuing engagement of the idiom of African-American preaching, the idiom which cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson has nominated as the “jewel in the crown of Black Sacred Rhetoric”. While many studies of Baldwin include the fact that Baldwin was a preacher’s son and that Baldwin himself preached for a time during his youth, the account is yet to be given of how Baldwin’s writings continued to employ the rhythms, grammar, tones, and textures of the Black sacred rhetorical tradition, especially from beyond the borders of the African-American church. This essay seeks to expose not only how Baldwin self-consciously continued to stand in the rhetorical trajectory of the African-American preaching tradition, but the attempt is also to reveal how the writer secularizes the idiom, providing the Black Holiness preacher a hearing from beyond the church. Through a focus on Baldwin as a Black sacred rhetorician, sermonizing from beyond the church, this essay participates in the nearly 100-year-old conversation instigated by the early African-American literary and cultural critic James Weldon Johnson in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), regarding the neglected significance of the sermon and the preacher in African-American literature and Black expressive cultures. Baldwin’s sermonic is here examined as a highly distinctive mode of Black public theologizing. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans)
14 pages, 264 KiB  
Article
Striving for a Complete Life: The Spiritual Essence of African–Americans’ Food Justice Activism
by Lynn R. Johnson
Religions 2023, 14(11), 1361; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14111361 - 27 Oct 2023
Viewed by 873
Abstract
This essay employs Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”, as an acute lens through which to assess and impart new meanings to African–American activists’ strivings to reach an ideal state of humanness and communal holism as [...] Read more.
This essay employs Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”, as an acute lens through which to assess and impart new meanings to African–American activists’ strivings to reach an ideal state of humanness and communal holism as they fulfilled their personal, political, and spiritual missions in the food realm during the 1960s Civil Rights era and the contemporary food justice movement. Narrative analyses of these Black activists’ personal testimonies convey that their discrete journeys to completeness—what Dr King called the ideal state of humanity in its fullness—were not only facilitated by a divine calling but were also conditioned by the enactment of their Christian faith, particularly in reconciling the affective tolls engendered by their participation in lunch-counter sit-ins and by their quests to help alleviate food insecurity among impoverish populations in the American South. Indeed, when these individuals consciously endeavored to master the three dimensions of a complete life—recognize their agency, honor the interconnectedness of humanity, and seek God’s guidance in doing both—were they able to embody their best selves and demand the realization of a truly democratic nation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans)
14 pages, 250 KiB  
Article
Black or White: The Art of Rhetoric in Sunset Limited
by Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr.
Religions 2023, 14(10), 1298; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14101298 - 16 Oct 2023
Viewed by 902
Abstract
The film Sunset Limited is an HBO adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s play of the same name, and it is an in-depth character study of two individuals: Black (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and White (played by Tommy Lee Jones). In the beginning of [...] Read more.
The film Sunset Limited is an HBO adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s play of the same name, and it is an in-depth character study of two individuals: Black (played by Samuel L. Jackson) and White (played by Tommy Lee Jones). In the beginning of the film, Black has already saved White from committing suicide and they are sitting together at a small, round kitchen table; viewers learn that Black was going to work when he saw White on the train platform about ready to jump in front of the Sunset Limited. Black is a religious Christian and White is an outright atheist; one believes in Jesus Christ and one believes in nothing; one has faith and one has no faith in anything. These ideological standpoints (the lack of an ideology is still an ideology) are the foundation of this text. The focus of Suset Limited is the push and pull between religious belief (Black) and philosophical thought (White), which ultimately will determine whether White stays and decides to live, or goes and decides to take his life. In essence, Sunset Limited is an exercise in rhetoric, in the art of persuasion, and how this artform can be used in both religious and secular conversation. This study of Sunset Limited will devote time to Cormac McCarthy’s connections to religion and philosophy using research about his work; then, there will be an in-depth textual analysis of the film, which will speak to not only who these characters are but also what they want to relay to one another about what they know (rather than what they believe) about the world. Black and White are polar opposites of each other (black and white); what this essay intends to prove is that there are similarities to their thought processes, even if they may not recognize it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans)
12 pages, 3920 KiB  
Article
From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom
by Ada C. M. Thomas
Religions 2023, 14(10), 1285; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14101285 - 12 Oct 2023
Viewed by 796
Abstract
In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, [...] Read more.
In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans)
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18 pages, 255 KiB  
Article
“The New Americans”, “the New Muslims”: African American Muslims and the Recreation of American Muslim Identities after 9/11, 2001
by Hajer Ben Hadj Salem
Religions 2023, 14(10), 1232; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14101232 - 25 Sep 2023
Viewed by 706
Abstract
This study sheds light on the identity negotiation processes inside the African American Muslim communities and the post-1960s immigrant Muslim communities both before and after 9/11, and the various hurdles that have impeded the development of a pluralistic American Muslim identity. It locates [...] Read more.
This study sheds light on the identity negotiation processes inside the African American Muslim communities and the post-1960s immigrant Muslim communities both before and after 9/11, and the various hurdles that have impeded the development of a pluralistic American Muslim identity. It locates the American Muslim experience within the omnibus context of religious pluralism and draws on Barbara McGraw’s “the American Sacred Ground” theoretical framework (2003) to gauge advances and setbacks in such identity negotiation processes. While gleaning insights from the works of scholars of Islam and religious pluralism in America, this study is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the USA between 2002 and 2006. After 9/11, both communities came to realize that it is vital to engage in a process of self-critique and confront the challenges of reinventing themselves on the American pluralistic tapestry. While the African American Sunni communities tried to reinvent themselves as ‘new Muslims’, the immigrant communities found themselves compelled to reinvent themselves as “new Americans”. In studying some facets of such an inter- and intracommunity identity (re)negotiation process, this article argues that perennial internal factionalism and the promotion of changing US foreign policy agendas in the Muslim world still represent a major stumbling block towards developing an American Muslim identity that draws on its many streams. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Something Bigger than Ourselves: Religion in the Lives of African Americans)
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